Annalee Newitz, founding editor of IO9 and former EFF staffer, has a new book out today called Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, and it's terrific.

Scatter's premise is that the human race will face extinction-grade crises in the future, and that we can learn how to survive them by examining the strategies of species that successfully weathered previous extinction events, and cultures and tribes of humans that have managed to survive their own near-annihilation.

What follows from this is a whirlwind tour of geology, evolutionary biology, cultural anthropology and human history, as Newitz catalogs the terrifying disasters, catastrophes and genocides of geology and antiquity. From there, the book transitions into a sprightly whistle-stop tour of sustainable cities, synthetic biology, computer science, geoengineering, climate science, new materials science, urban theory, genomics, geopolitics, everything up to and including the Singularity, as Newitz lays out the technologies in our arsenal for adapting ourselves to upcoming disasters, and adapting our planet (and ultimately our solar system) to our long-term survival.

This has both the grand sweep and the fast pace of a classic OMNI theme issue, but one that's far more thoroughly grounded in real science, caveated where necessary. It's a refreshingly grand sweep for a popular science book, and if it only skims over some of its subjects, that's OK, because in the age of the Net, one need only signpost the subjects the reader might dive into on her own once she realizes their awesome potential.

This is a delight of a book, balanced on the knife-edge of disaster and delirious hope. It neither predicts our species' apotheosis nor its doom, but suggests paths to reach the former while avoiding the latter.

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/05/14/scatter-adapt-and-remember.html/feed 6 http://boingboing.net/2013/03/25/climate-answers-sought-in-supe.html http://boingboing.net/2013/03/25/climate-answers-sought-in-supe.html#comments Mon, 25 Mar 2013 18:59:36 +0000 Rob Beschizza http://boingboing.net/?p=220891 The Verge:

There's a dark cloud hanging over the science of climate change, quite literally. Scientists today have access to supercomputers capable of running advanced simulations of Earth's climate hundreds of years into the future, accounting for millions of tiny variables.

If you read The Long Winter, Laura Ingalls Wilder's novel about narrowly avoiding starving to death during a ferocious winter on the South Dakota prairie, then you'll remember how the trains stopped running because of the snowfall. In fact, that's a big part of why Laura and her family were so hungry — their harvest had been lean and the train carried the supplies they were dependent upon.

I'd never had a real clear idea of what "the train can't get through" really meant, not being totally clear on how to adjust snow-clearing expectations from today back to the 1880s. But, as it turns out, when the train company said they couldn't get the trains through, they were not messing around. The above image, from the Minnesota Historical Society, shows you the kind of snowfall we're talking about. That picture was taken in southern Minnesota, during the same winter — 1880-1881 — that nearly killed Laura Ingalls Wilder. Please note the dude standing on top of the train. He really gives you the overwhelming sense of scale.

Last year, Barbara Mayes-Boustead, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, actually looked at the records we have for temperatures and snowfall from that winter, most of which come from military forts and major cities miles away from the small town of DeSmet, where Laura Ingalls Wilder lived. Mayes-Boustead found that the story in the book matches up reasonably accurately with actual data.

She's got a series of short audio commentaries on the winter of 1880-1881 and how it plays out in the Little House books, including a really fascinating one about the climate patterns and probably created those many months of blizzards. By looking at weather patterns from the time and at the climate systems we associate with weather like that today, Mayes-Boustead says that we can probably blame the Long Winter on a combination of a strong negative North Atlantic Oscillation — a pattern in the jet stream that sucks icy air from the Arctic down into the Midwestern US — and an El Nino year — which tends to make that same region of the county wetter than usual.

Listen to all of Barbara Mayes-Boustead's recorded presentations

Alexander sez, "James Balog had his movie Chasing Ice released, which is about the attempt to capture melting polar ice on film. A self-described daily Bill O'Reilly watcher, who used to tell people to get out of her house if they said global warming was anything other than 'bullshit', saw it -- and started crying. I really, really, want to see O'Reilly watching her reaction."

Synopsis « Chasing Ice (Thanks, Alexander!) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/11/28/bill-oreilly-watching-climat.html/feed 85 http://boingboing.net/2012/10/29/did-climate-change-cause-hurri.html http://boingboing.net/2012/10/29/did-climate-change-cause-hurri.html#comments Mon, 29 Oct 2012 17:12:11 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=190510 Image: Oct. 28, NASA/NOAA polar orbiting satellite. Detail above, full below.

Last year, I wrote a piece for BoingBoing about destructive storm systems and why it's so difficult to say, in concise sound-bite form, what relationship that destruction has to climate change. In that case, we were talking about tornadoes. But over the last couple of days, lots of people have been having roughly the same conversations about Hurricane Sandy. When the clouds have passed and everybody is done sleeping in airports, people are going to want answers. Was this an unavoidable act of nature? Or was this something caused directly by changes to Earth's climate that have happened because we burn fossil fuels which increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?

Again, there's not an easy answer. And, again, part of the problem here is that we're expecting science to operate on the scale of American media news cycles, which doesn't really work. We want to talk about this while the storm is raging or, barring that, at least immediately afterwards. But scientists aren't really going to have anything particularly deep to say about this specific storm for months, if not years. During that time, data will be analyzed and compared, and other events will happen, and that's really the stuff that we need in order to say much of anything other than, "We don't know for certain." In some ways, expecting anything else means forcing scientists to speculate and extrapolate in ways they aren't usually comfortable with and that aren't a terribly great way to understand the big picture.

But there's also something new, that I kind of didn't really think about when I was writing that post on the tornadoes. The answer to these questions also really depends on the motivations behind why you asked, and what it is that you really want to know.

First off, you should know that this kind of extreme (and extremely weird) storm system happening in fall or winter is a trend that some scientists had already been predicting. Those predictions stem from the steep reduction in quantities of sea ice in the North Atlantic and what we know (and think we know) about how that change affects climate patterns and storm formation as a whole.

Remember the times that we've talked about how climate change can, seemingly paradoxically, lead to heavier snowfall in winter? This is connected to that. Here's how Kate Spinner with The Herald Tribune explained it:

A big bubble of high pressure, with sinking air that moves clockwise, is interrupting the typical steering patterns in the atmosphere. That high pressure creates a blockage, backing up the jet stream so that it bends south, eventually looping north again, instead of flowing toward the east as usual.

The blocking pattern, centered just south of Greenland, will significantly slow the eastward-moving cold front once it reaches the coast. And it will steer Sandy into the U.S. rather than allowing it to turn east.

Blocking events are the force behind a lot of crazy weather anomalies, not just hurricanes. And there's evidence suggesting that, as the ice in the Arctic melts, the frequency and/or intensity of the blocking events may be increasing. The Climate Crocks blog did a nice interview about this a few months ago with Jennifer Francis, who studies marine and coastal sciences at Rutgers.

There's more on this from Francis, and other scientists, at Andy Revkin's DotEarth blog.

Another thing worth taking into account: Weather is a lot more complicated than you think it is. If it rains today — or if it doesn't rain — there are lots of different, interacting factors that influenced that outcome. A good way to think about it is like a plane crash. It is very, very rare for a plane crash to be caused by a single mistake. Instead, when you're reading the final report, you find that lots of things have to go wrong all at the same time. Even then, you still might not get an accident if the mix of mistakes that happen don't interact with each other in such a way as to make them all worse than the sum of their parts.

Plane crashes are complicated. And so is weather. That matters, because it means that Hurricane Sandy could be both a completely natural occurrence and a product of climate change. Simultaneously. Some of the factors that caused this storm might be nature-made. Others might be man-made. And teasing apart which factors were responsible for which aspect of the storm's damage is incredibly hard.

Greg Laden, an anthropologist who does some very good blogging on climate science, had a lot to say on this topic — particularly, the fact that even though we can't say "Hurricane Sandy was caused solely by climate change", we can say that climate change is probably affecting several factors that probably influence the development, growth, and movement of hurricanes.

It is often said that storms are going to happen anyway, but global warming ramps up the probability, which is akin to saying that there is always going to be variation in temperature or some other weather related factor but global warming raises the baseline. That’s true. But the corollary to that is NOT that you can’t link climate change to a given storm. All storms are weather, all weather is the immediate manifestation of climate, climate change is about climate. Before we started talking about global warming, storms were caused by … things. Climate things. Did we ever say, back in the 1950s when a hurricane hit Florida, “Oh, ya, that was some hurricane, but the thing is, you can’t really attribute a given hurricane to the Intertropical Convergence Zone’s relationship to warm Mid Atlantic currents. The former is a weather event and the latter is a climate system.” Why did we not ever say that? Because it would have been irrelevant, even dumb.

The truth is, we experience more Atlantic severe storms because of global warming, though we are still working out the details of which features of which kinds of storms are affected most. Beyond this, it may well also be possible that something I hinted at above is true: We may be experiencing kinds of storms today that were very rare in recent centuries, because of global warming.

Adam Frank at NPR also wrote a good post on this subject. In it, he explains another issue that muddies the waters. When we say that weather is complicated and that a storm is caused by the interaction of lots of different factors, what we are really saying is that weather is a system. Just like climate is a system. Currently, there are some systems that science understands better than others. Hurricanes are, unfortunately, pretty far down on the list.

There is a hierarchy of weather events which scientists feel they understand well enough for establishing climate change links. Global temperature rises and extreme heat rank high on that list, but Hurricanes rank low. As the IPCC special report on extreme events put it "There is low confidence in any observed long-term (i.e., 40 years or more) increases in tropical cyclone activity (i.e., intensity, frequency, duration), after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities."

The reasons for "low confidence" are manifold. Some part of the caution comes from the complexity of the problem, and some part comes from the lack of good data before the satellite era (about 1970). Thus, many climate scientists will not want to go out on a limb for hurricanes. They just don't have the tools to make strong inferences.

This is not to say progress isn't being made. One thing that does seem clear is that warmer oceans (a la global warming) mean more evaporation, and that likely leads to storms with more and more dangerous rainfall of the kind we saw with Hurricane Irene last year. In addition, a paper published just last month, used records of storm surges going back to 1923 as a measure of hurricane activity. A strong correlation between warm years and strong hurricanes was seen. Thus if you warm the planet, you can expect more dangerous storms.

Basically, we know that the effects of climate change probably has an impact on factors that cause massively destructive storms — even if we don't know exactly how much of an impact; even if we can't really use that information to exactly predict what's going to happen with massive storms in the future; and even if we can't tell you whether Sandy, specifically, was caused by climate change.

So, really, the answer to the question, "What is the relationship between Hurricane Sandy and climate change", depends primarily on why you're asking the question.

If you're just kind of curious and/or looking for something to blame, we don't have great answers on that yet. I'm sorry. Nobody is really going to be able to tell you one way or the other.

But if you're using that question as a proxy to really ask, "Is climate change real and do I have to care about it?", well, good news! We have enough information to answer your question. And the answer is, emphatically, yes.

Read More:
Besides the links I included in the story, I want to point you towards a couple more Hurricane Sandy-related things:
• NOAA's Storm Central has all the maps, satellite images, and projections of Sandy that a concerned citizen (or giant nerd) could want
• The director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness would like you to know that we are seriously, seriously NOT prepared for big disasters
• Atlantic City is totally flooded
• Marketplace Tech Report has a really fascinating piece on the future of weather forecasting
• If you're in Sandy's path and aren't really clear what to do with your pets, read this
• The NASA Satellite video will haunt your nightmares
• Meanwhile, the news that the satellites we rely on for forecasts of hurricanes are aging rapidly (and there aren't great plans to replace them) will create your nightmares
• Use this handy slider to compare Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Sandy

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/10/29/did-climate-change-cause-hurri.html/feed 36 http://boingboing.net/2012/09/05/at-sea-for-science.html http://boingboing.net/2012/09/05/at-sea-for-science.html#comments Wed, 05 Sep 2012 20:14:23 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=179499 Joides Resolution is a large boat—more than 450 feet long and almost 70 feet wide. That's small compared to a lot of cruise ships, but big enough to house and feed and provide work space for 126 people. It's a floating city, with a movie theater, helipad, hospital, cafeteria, laboratories, and a giant drilling rig. But even a big boat can start to feel small when you have nowhere else to go, and no land in sight, for two whole months.]]>

The Joides Resolution is a large boat—more than 450 feet long and almost 70 feet wide. That's small compared to a lot of cruise ships, but big enough to house and feed and provide work space for 126 people. It's a floating city, with a movie theater, helipad, hospital, cafeteria, laboratories, and a giant drilling rig. But even a big boat can start to feel small when you have nowhere else to go, and no land in sight, for two whole months.

Some science can't be done on shore, and the Joides Resolution is one of the tools researchers use to learn more about the world beneath the waves. The ship travels the globe, serving as a mobile research station for scientists who want to study the bottom of the sea.

Between June 2 and August 1, 2012, a team of researchers, technicians, and support staff took the Joides Resolution north, to the cold waters off Newfoundland. Their goal: Collect samples of mud, clay, and muck from the ocean floor. Using a deep-sea drilling system, they lowered thousands of feet of pipe through the water, and forced it into the sea floor below. When the pipes were pulled back up on deck, they contained core samples—cylindrical logs that allowed the scientists to see layer after layer of sediment. By looking at what those cores are made of, the chemistry they contain, and the physical fossils buried deep inside them, researchers can begin to reconstruct what Earth's climate must have been like tens of millions of years ago.

On July 11th, while the Joides Resolution was still at sea, I got to interview several of the scientists on board. Paleontologist Richard Norris, geochemist Jessica Whiteside, and sedimentologist Chris Junium (along with communications officer Caitlin Scully) talked to me about their research, what they hoped to learn, and what it was like to live in a laboratory far from home.

These are the tubes that are driven vertically into the sea floor by the Joides Resolution's drilling rig. They'll come back up full of sediment from the bottom of the ocean.

You can listen to my full interview with the scientists via Soundcloud—or download it as a podcast. It's almost an hour long, but you'll learn a lot about how the scientists (and the rest of the crew) work, how they live, and what they study. I think it's interesting to hear this story straight from the people who are experiencing it, especially when you're talking about an experience that simultaneously brings together with an incredibly diverse group of people, while also thoroughly cutting them off from the rest of humanity.

In a lot of ways, the Joides Resolution is like the research stations in Antarctica. Truly an international effort—"more international than the International Space Station," as Richard Norris put it—it's also interdisciplinary. Scientists literally cannot do this kind of work on their own. In order for a science team of 30-some people to function, they have to work alongside 20 technicians and more than 70 crew members, including cooks, electricians, and welders. It creates a different sort of community and a different sort of environment than what you'd find in a lab on land. At the same time, as Chris Junium describes, everyone on that boat is very far away from their friends and their family for a very long time.

This is the Moon Pool, which the researchers talk about in the interview. It's a hole that goes all the way through the ship, creating a pool of sea water on the deck of the Joides Resolution. Besides serving as a launching port for underwater research vessels, the Moon Pool is also necessary for the drilling operations. The drilling pipes are so heavy that they can't be lowered over the side of the ship. If you did that, the whole thing would list. Instead, the drill goes down through the Moon Pool, down through the center of the ship, itself, keeping the weight balanced and the boat afloat.

We've also got a series of videos that will allow you to see some of the stuff the scientists talk about in the interview (and give you a way to hit the highlights without listening to an hour-long podcast).

In the first film, you'll meet some of the people who spent two months on board the Joides Resolution this summer, and get an inside look at what their lives were like.

The second film shows you how the crew of the Joides Resolution went about collecting those all-important samples of sea-floor sediment. It's not as simple as you might think. The Joides Resolution does its drilling in deep water. It can't anchor. Instead, the boat has to be carefully positioned so it doesn't twist and torque the drilling pipes as it moves on the surface of the water.

Finally, what do the scientists do with those sea-floor samples once they've got them? This last video follows the core samples from the ocean to the lab. You'll see how researchers keep track of hundreds and hundreds of tubes of muck, and find out how they make sense of what they're seeing. You'll also get to meet the Green Monster—a thick and frustratingly persistent layer of mud much younger than the sediments the researchers were hoping to find.

Learn more about Joides Resolution Expedition 342

See more photos from the trip

Watch more videos made on board the Joides Resolution

This is how Hurricane Isaac looked on Tuesday, as it made landfall on America's Gulf Coast. If you've never been to the Gulf of Mexico, here is a key fact you should know: The water there is warm. While Pacific coastal waters might be in the 50s during August, and the central Atlantic coast is pulling temperatures in the 60s and 70s, the water in the Gulf of Mexico is well into the 80s.

And that makes a difference. We know that water temperature affects hurricane strength. But we don't understand the particulars of how or why at a detail level. To learn more about this (and other factors that make each hurricane an individual), researchers at the University of Miami are building a simulation machine. When it's complete, it will be a key tool in improving forecasts.

Peter Sollogub, Associate Principal at Cambridge Seven, says the hurricane simulator is comprised of three major components:
The first is a 1400-horsepower fan originally suited for things like ventilating mine shafts. To create its 150mph winds, it will draw energy from the campus's emergency generator system, which is typically used during power outages caused by storms.

The second part is a wave generator which pushes salt water using 12 different paddles. Those paddles, timed to move at different paces and rates, can create waves at various sizes, angles and frequency, creating anything from a calm, organized swell to sloppy chaotic seas.

The third aspect of the tank is the tank itself, which is six meters in width by 20 meters in length by two meters high. It's made of three-inch thick clear acrylic so that the conditions inside can be observed from all sides.

Read more about the hurricane simulator at Popular Science

On Monday, I posted about an incredibly fascinating study linking the minerals that fertilize the Amazon rainforest to a specific corner of the Sahara desert in the country of Chad. That lake of sand—once an actual lake the size of California—is what keeps the Amazon green and verdant.

The interesting thing is that the study is actually not anything new. It came out in 2006. I heard about it from science writer Colin Schultz. Earlier this week, Colin went on News Talk 610 CKTB out of Niagara Falls, Ontario, to talk about how he stumbled across the study and why it's important far beyond simply connecting the desert and the jungle.

The interview delves into the subject in a lot more depth. In fact, it's a great demonstration of how reading a single research paper can be interesting, but doesn't necessarily give you the full picture of what's actually going on in science. Turns out, what we know about how dust travels to the Amazon has important implications for how we think about climate change and geoengineering. Also great: Colin comparing the volume of dust traveling from the Sahara to the volume of several Honda Civics. It's short, and very much worth listening to.

You can follow Colin Schultz on Twitter. BTW: He'd like you to know that when he says "bioengineers" in the interview, he means "geoengineers".

Read More:
• A 2010 Nature News article on the connection between the Sahara and the Amazon.
• Geophysical Research Letters on changes in dust transport over time.
• NASA on the way that dust affects climate.
• A 2010 follow-up to the 2006 paper by the same group of researchers. Colin says that this gets more into the details of how the dust becomes an important fertilizer in the Amazon.

Watch in awe as CNN's Carol Costello tells Bill Nye, a respected scientist, engineer, and science educator, that he's a "kooky guy who doesn't know what he's talking about" when he asserts the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change.

Bill Nye - Could climate change be wildfire cause? ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/07/13/cnn-reporter-tells-bill-nye-th.html/feed 120 http://boingboing.net/2012/07/07/weatherman-predicts-the-end-ti.html http://boingboing.net/2012/07/07/weatherman-predicts-the-end-ti.html#comments Sat, 07 Jul 2012 21:54:36 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=169925

Here's a weather report for the apocalypse: "On WTVR CBS 6 in Richmond, VA, weatherman Aaron Justus provides the last weather forecast you'll ever need."

Hot Weather in Richmond this Weekend (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Here's a weather report for the apocalypse: "On WTVR CBS 6 in Richmond, VA, weatherman Aaron Justus provides the last weather forecast you'll ever need."

Hot Weather in Richmond this Weekend (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/07/07/weatherman-predicts-the-end-ti.html/feed 24 http://boingboing.net/2012/07/03/maggie-at-convergence-twin-ci.html http://boingboing.net/2012/07/03/maggie-at-convergence-twin-ci.html#comments Tue, 03 Jul 2012 14:12:12 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=168879 CONvergence draws upwards of 5,000 people to the Minneapolis/St.Paul area for a celebrations of science fiction, fantasy, comic books, and general geekery. This year, I'll be one of them. I'm participating in several of the Con's science and skepticism-themed panels.]]> CONvergence draws upwards of 5,000 people to the Minneapolis/St.Paul area for a celebrations of science fiction, fantasy, comic books, and general geekery. This year, I'll be one of them. I'm participating in several of the Con's science and skepticism-themed panels. On July 6th, you can catch me at 3:30 pm, talking about facts, controversy, and climate change; and at 8:30 pm, I'll be on a panel about the physiology of drugs and alcohol. July 7th at 12:30 pm, I'll be on a panel about climate change denialism in the classroom. At 2:00 pm that same day, I'll be talking about women in science and technology. There will also be a chance on Friday to buy a copy of Before the Lights Go Out, my book on electric infrastructure and the future of energy, and/or get your copy signed by me. Hope to see you there!]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/07/03/maggie-at-convergence-twin-ci.html/feed 1 http://boingboing.net/2012/06/23/learn-about-climate-energy-a.html http://boingboing.net/2012/06/23/learn-about-climate-energy-a.html#comments Sat, 23 Jun 2012 15:10:58 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=167385 I'll be tweeting regularly from the panels I watch.]]> I'll be tweeting regularly from the panels I watch. For instance, if you check out the tag now, you can find some great tweets from last night, covering a discussion with Stewart Brand about biotech, cloning, and the possibility of reversing extinction.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/06/23/learn-about-climate-energy-a.html/feed 1 http://boingboing.net/2012/06/21/the-aftermath-of-extreme-weath.html http://boingboing.net/2012/06/21/the-aftermath-of-extreme-weath.html#comments Thu, 21 Jun 2012 17:32:46 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=167200

IMAGE: Derek Montgomery for MPR

That is not the result of an earthquake. Instead, this is what happens when a city receives as much as 10 inches of rain in three days. Over the last two days, flash flooding ripped apart Duluth—and other cities in Northeast Minnesota/Northwest Wisconsin.

]]>

IMAGE: Derek Montgomery for MPR

That is not the result of an earthquake. Instead, this is what happens when a city receives as much as 10 inches of rain in three days. Over the last two days, flash flooding ripped apart Duluth—and other cities in Northeast Minnesota/Northwest Wisconsin. The damage in Duluth alone is expected to be in the millions. There will be street repairs, sewer line replacements, damage to private homes and businesses. The photos are devastating. Luckily, it seems that nobody died, but my heart goes out to everyone dealing with the aftermath of these storms.

At Minnesota Public Radio's Updraft blog, Paul Huttner explains how Duluth, a city built on a hillside and not near any big rivers, can end up with flooding this intense.

A cold front approached Minnesota from the High Plains on Sunday, June 17th and this front set off numerous thunderstorms through the evening. Duluth NWS received nearly an inch of rain (0.71"). The rains that fell on Sunday had inundated the soil, and created more saturated conditions than normal, which primed the Duluth area for runoff in the extreme rain event that we received

Meanwhile, 1/3 of the state of Minnesota is under drought conditions.

In pre-response to the inevitable climate change discussion, let me just remind you of meteorologist Paul Douglas' brilliant analogy:

You can’t point to any one weather extreme and say “that’s climate change”. But a warmer atmosphere loads the dice, increasing the potential for historic spikes in temperature and more frequent and bizarre weather extremes. You can’t prove that any one of Barry Bond’s 762 home runs was sparked by (alleged) steroid use. But it did increase his “base state,” raising the overall odds of hitting a home run.

See more photos from Duluth, including the soon-to-be-classic shot of an escaped zoo seal wandering the streets of downtown.

Read Paul Huttner's Updraft blog

Read an earlier post about Paul Douglas and his thoughts on climate change.

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/06/21/the-aftermath-of-extreme-weath.html/feed 44

Paul Douglas is a Minneapolis/St.Paul meteorologist. Meteorologists don't study the same things as climate scientists—remember, weather and climate are different things—but Douglas is a meteorologist who has taken the time to look at research published by climate scientists and listen to their expertise. Combined with the patterns he's seen in weather, that information has led Douglas to accept that climate change is real, and that it's something we need to be addressing.

Paul Douglas is also a conservative. In a recent guest blog post on Climate Progress, he explains why climate isn't (or, anyway, shouldn't be) a matter of political identity. We'll get back to that, but first I want to call attention to a really great analogy that Douglas uses to explain weather, climate, and the relationship between the two.

You can’t point to any one weather extreme and say “that’s climate change”. But a warmer atmosphere loads the dice, increasing the potential for historic spikes in temperature and more frequent and bizarre weather extremes. You can’t prove that any one of Barry Bond’s 762 home runs was sparked by (alleged) steroid use. But it did increase his “base state,” raising the overall odds of hitting a home run.

Mr. Douglas, I'm going to be stealing that analogy. (Don't worry, I credit!)

A few weeks ago, I linked you to the introduction from my new book, Before the Lights Go Out, where I argue that there are reasons for people to care about energy, even if they don't believe in climate change—and that we need to use those points of overlap to start making energy changes that everyone can agree on, even if we all don't agree on why we're changing.

But there's another, related, idea, which Paul Douglas' essay gets right to the heart of. Just like there's more than one reason to care about energy, there's also more than one way to care about climate. Concern for the environment—and for the impact changes to the environment could have on us—is not a concept that can only be expressed in the terms of lefty environmentalism.

You and I can think about the environment in very different ways. We can have very different identities, and disagree on lots of cultural and political issues. All of those things can be true—and, yet, we can still come to the same, basic conclusions about climate, risk, and what must be done. Here's Douglas' perspective:

I’m a Christian, and I can’t understand how people who profess to love and follow God roll their eyes when the subject of climate change comes up. Actions have consequences. Were we really put here to plunder the Earth, no questions asked? Isn’t that the definition of greed? In the Bible, Luke 16:2 says, “Man has been appointed as a steward for the management of God’s property, and ultimately he will give account for his stewardship.” Future generations will hold us responsible for today’s decisions.

This concept—Creation Care—is something that I've summed up as, "Your heavenly father wants you clean up after yourself." It's not a message that is going to make sense to everybody. But it's an important message, nonetheless, because it has the potential to reach people who might not otherwise see a place for themselves at this table.

Too often, both liberals and conservatives approach climate change as something that is tangled up in a lot of lifestyle, political, and cultural choices it has nothing to do with. Those assumptions lead the right to feel like they can't accept the reality of climate change without rejecting every other part of their identities and belief systems. Those same assumptions lead the left to spend way too much time preaching to choir—while being confused about why people outside the congregation aren't responding to their message.

That's why essays like Douglas' are so important. We look at the world in different ways. We come by our values for different reasons. But even though we might take different paths, we can come to some of the same places. Let's respect that. And let's have those conversations. Climate change is about facts, not ideologies. It's about risks that affect everyone. We need to do a better job of discussing climate change in a way that makes this clear. And that means reaching out to people with language and perspectives that they can identify with.

Read Paul Douglas' full post on Climate Progress.

Read more about energy, climate, and what we can do to make the message of climate science more universal in my book, Before the Lights Go Out.

The allegation of "muzzling" came up at a session of the AAAS meeting to discuss the impact of a media protocol introduced by the Conservative government shortly after it was elected in 2008.

The protocol requires that all interview requests for scientists employed by the government must first be cleared by officials. A decision as to whether to allow the interview can take several days, which can prevent government scientists commenting on breaking news stories.

Sources say that requests are often refused and when interviews are granted, government media relations officials can and do ask for written questions to be submitted in advance and elect to sit in on the interview...

The Postmedia News journalist obtained documents relating to interview requests using Canada's equivalent of the Freedom of Information Act. She said the documents show interview requests move up what she describes as an "increasingly thick layer of media managers, media strategists, deputy ministers, then go up to the Privy Council Office, which decides 'yes' or 'no'".

Canadian government is 'muzzling its scientists (Thanks, DaveGroff!)

(Image: Frankenstein's Monster, gagged, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from kazvorpal's photostream) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/02/18/canadas-government-muzzles-s.html/feed 40 http://boingboing.net/2012/02/08/whats-causing-europes-cold.html http://boingboing.net/2012/02/08/whats-causing-europes-cold.html#comments Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:49:13 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=142774 One of the things that makes it difficult to understand weather, climate, and long-term climate changes is the fact that, when something noticeable happens, there's a good chance it's being caused by more than one thing. So, when you look at a weather phenomenon and ask, "Is this being caused by anthropogenic climate change?", there's several (technically correct) ways that question could be answered.

In response, a much larger group of actual climate scientists signed onto a letter rebutting the first letter. The WSJ rejected it. Instead, the pre-eminent science journal Science, which is know for its rigor in treatments of science, published it, as "Climate change and the Integrity of Science" on January 27th, 2012.

(i) The planet is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. A snowy winter in Washington does not alter this fact.

(ii) Most of the increase in the concentration of these gases over the last century is due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

(iii) Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth's climate, but are now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes.

(iv) Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patterns to change at speeds unprecedented in modern times, including increasing rates of sea-level rise and alterations in the hydrologic cycle. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making the oceans more acidic.

(v) The combination of these complex climate changes threatens coastal communities and cities, our food and water supplies, marine and freshwater ecosystems, forests, high mountain environments, and far more.

Two incontrovertible things: Anthropogenic Global Warming is Real, and the Wall Street Journal is Political Rag ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/01/28/wsjs-partisan-approach-to-cl.html/feed 122 http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/whats-up-with-the-weather.html http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/whats-up-with-the-weather.html#comments Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:18:17 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=138150

Yesterday evening, I stood at a bus stop in Minneapolis wearing no socks, no gloves, and no hat. The breeze was warm. The birds were singing. Clearly, something is deeply wrong here. In fact, 2012 has brought the warmest start to a January on record in the Twin Cities.

 

Yesterday evening, I stood at a bus stop in Minneapolis wearing no socks, no gloves, and no hat. The breeze was warm. The birds were singing. Clearly, something is deeply wrong here. In fact, 2012 has brought the warmest start to a January on record in the Twin Cities. We're also in the middle of a major drought, which, this time of year, means no snow on the ground.

All of that has consequences—just this morning Minnesota Public Radio was talking about the economic impact the drought has had on snowmobile-based tourism in this state. What everybody wants to know: Is this caused by climate change? Is this what it will be like next year, too?

That's really hard to say. Remember: The really solid stuff scientists can tell you about climate change comes from analysis of trends over decades—for instance, when you look at global temperature anomalies over 50 years and find that the last time the global mean monthly average was lower than the 20th century average was back in February 1985. That's because, while anthropogenic climate change exists, it's not the only thing influencing the local weather or the global climate. The climate system involves a lot of different phenomena, which act alone and together. We can see a pattern of warming that can be linked to rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. But there's other stuff going on, too, which affects year-to-year fluctuations within the decades-long pattern.

In this case, says Jeff Marsters on the Weather Underground blog, the abnormally high temperatures are related to oddities in the jet stream—air currents in Earth's atmosphere. And those oddities may, or may not, be the result of anthropogenic climate change.

The cause of this warm first half of winter is the most extreme configuration of the jet stream ever recorded, as measured by the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). The Arctic Oscillation (AO), and its close cousin, the North Atlantic Oscillation, are climate patterns in the Northern Hemisphere defined by fluctuations in the difference of sea-level pressure in the North Atlantic between the Icelandic Low and the Azores High. The AO and NAO have significant impacts on winter weather in North America and Europe--the AO and NAO affect the path, intensity, and shape of the jet stream, influencing where storms track and how strong these storms become. During December 2011, the NAO index was +2.52, which was the most extreme difference in pressure between Iceland and the Azores ever observed in December (records of the NAO go back to 1865.) The AO during December 2011 had its second most extreme December value on record, behind the equally unusual December of 2006. These positive AO/NAO conditions caused the Icelandic Low to draw a strong south-westerly flow of air over eastern North America, preventing Arctic air from plunging southward over the U.S. and Europe.

The December Arctic Oscillation index has fluctuated wildly over the past six years, with the two most extreme positive and two most extreme negative values on record. Unfortunately, we don't understand why the AO varies so much from winter to winter, nor why the AO has taken on such extreme configurations during four of the past six winters. Climate models are generally too crude to make skillful predictions on how human-caused climate change may be affecting the AO, or what might happen to the AO in the future. There is research linking an increase in solar activity and sunspots with the positive phase of the AO. Solar activity has increased sharply this winter compared to the past two winters, so perhaps we have seen a strong solar influence on the winter AO the past three winters. Arctic sea ice loss has been linked to the negative (cold) phase of the AO, like we observed the previous two winters. Those winters both had near-record low amounts of sunspot activity, so sea ice loss and low sunspot activity may have combined to bring a negative AO.

Image: Crazy (awesome) Minnesota Christmas weather, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from shilad's photostream. Please note the lack of snow, the fact that there is open water on Lake Harriet, the presence of ducks, and the lack of hat and gloves on that woman. This is not normal for Minnesota in December. 

 

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Australian comedy-news program The Hamster Wheel covers archconservative British politician Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, a Thatcherite climate denier, and former editor for The Sunday Telegraph and other right-wing papers. The Hamster Wheel decides that Monckton (who once advocated confining people with AIDS to lifetime quarantine) must actually be a long-running Sacha Baron Cohen ("Bruno," "Borat") character and makes a compelling case that this must be so.

The Hamster Wheel: Lord Monckton (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/11/08/climate-denier-as-borat-what-if-christopher-monckton-was-really-a-long-running-sacha-baron-cohen-character.html/feed 27 http://boingboing.net/2011/08/18/what-fukushima-can-teach-us-about-coal-pollution.html http://boingboing.net/2011/08/18/what-fukushima-can-teach-us-about-coal-pollution.html#comments Thu, 18 Aug 2011 17:44:34 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=114168

Earlier this week, I told you about a new study tracking radioactive fallout from the nuclear power plant disaster in Fukushima, Japan.

It started with a team of researchers in California, who had been monitoring radioactive sulfur in the atmosphere since 2009.

Earlier this week, I told you about a new study tracking radioactive fallout from the nuclear power plant disaster in Fukushima, Japan.

It started with a team of researchers in California, who had been monitoring radioactive sulfur in the atmosphere since 2009. Last spring, after an earthquake and tsunami critically damaged several reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, those researchers watched the levels of radioactive sulfur skyrocket, relatively speaking. The amounts of radioactive sulfur that reached the California coast weren't high enough to be a threat to humans, but they made a big impact on extremely sensitive monitoring equipment.

Using that data, the researchers were able to figure out where the radioactive sulfur came from and back-calculate how much would have been produced at the site of the disaster—information that can tell us something about how dangerous the disaster really was to people living nearby.

But these researchers weren't the first to collect radioactive isotopes from Fukushima on American shores. And they weren't the first to offer up improved estimations of how much radiation leaked from the damaged power plant in the early days of the disaster. I thought this study was interesting. But, like a lot of you, I was left wondering why it was important.

Then yesterday, I interviewed Antra Priyadarshi, the lead author on the peer-reviewed paper that was published about this study. And I realized I'd gotten the story all wrong. This paper is about radioactive sulfur from the Fukushima disaster. But it isn't about the Fukushima disaster. It's not even about nuclear power. Not really.

In reality, this is a paper about coal. And it's important because of what it can tell us about the sort of air pollution that is much more mundane—and more deadly—than the fallout from a single nuclear disaster.

To get this, you first have to understand who the researchers are and why they've been monitoring radioactive sulfur for so long. It has nothing to do with nuclear power or nuclear weapons.

Antra Priyadarshi is a postdoc—a scientist who has recently earned their Ph.D., but is doing research under the guidance of another, older scientist. You can think of it like an apprenticeship program, in a way. Priyadarshi works in the lab of Mark Thiemens, an atmospheric scientist. The Thiemens Lab is interested in questions of climate systems and the chemical makeup of the atmosphere. In particular, they're interested in ozone.

Ozone is a molecule of three oxygen atoms bound together, and it's the same stuff that makes up the protective ozone layer around there Earth. Way off in the upper atmosphere, ozone is a Good Thing. But context matters. When ozone ends up on our level, where humans can breathe it in, it becomes a problem. That's because ozone can, essentially, give the lining of your lungs a sunburn. The more ozone you inhale, the more damage to your cardiovascular system.

There's a couple of reasons ozone and people come into contact. One is pollution: On hot days, chemicals from car and factory exhaust can turn into ground-level ozone. But ozone from the upper atmosphere can also get transported down to our level naturally. One of the key things the Thiemens Lab is trying to understand is how those natural movements work, why they happen, and what that means for the way pollution-based ozone gets transported from exhaust-rich urban areas to other parts of the world.

This is where the radioactive sulfur comes in, because there's a natural source of that, as well.

In the upper atmosphere, where the naturally occurring ozone is formed, high-energy particles from cosmic rays react with argon to form radioactive sulfur. When air from high altitudes intrudes on our atmospheric level, it brings both ozone and radioactive sulfur along for the ride. Antra Priyadarshi has been monitoring radioactive sulfur both because of the role those isotopes play in climate—there's some evidence that they can serve as points for clouds to condense around and produce raindrops—and because of what the movement of sulfur can tell her about the movement of ozone.

So that explains why Priyadarshi and her colleagues were out there monitoring radioactive sulfur to begin with. But why is this paper important? What does it add to her research?

For that, you have to look to China, and a different form of sulfur.

The Smell of Success

When we burn coal, one of the things that goes up in smoke is sulfur dioxide. It's not radioactive, but it is dangerous. Sulfur dioxide, like ozone, damages human respiratory and cardiovascular systems. It's a key ingredient in acid rain, which harms crops and other plants, and damages buildings. And it's also a major player in producing particulate matter—tiny grains that get inside your lungs and cause long-term damage.

Particulate matter is also an important factor in climate change. That's because, while particulates are very bad for human health, they also play a role in cooling down the planet. Basically, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere trap heat and particulate matter in the atmosphere prevents heat from the sun from getting in. These two forces work against each other, even though, in man-made terms, they come from the same place—fossil fuel emissions.

When we talk about cleaning up emissions, we're usually talking about reducing the amount of sulfur and particulates produced, but not the amount of greenhouse gases. So, ironically, cleaner tailpipes and smokestacks save lives in the short term, but contribute to a rising global temperature in the long term.

That's why people are watching China. Western countries started scrubbing sulfur out of their emissions decades ago. Our emissions aren't sulfur-free, but they're a lot cleaner than they used to be. China, on the other hand, is rapidly ramping up the amount of coal it burns, and the emissions aren't being cleaned up. It's the world's largest sulfur dioxide polluter today. And scientists are curious about how that sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere is masking the effects of greenhouse gases. When China starts cleaning up its smokestacks, what will happen to the global temperature? How does sulfur dioxide from China affect the rest of the world?

That second question has been very difficult to answer. Think of all the coal that gets burnt everywhere, every day. In order to know something about how sulfur dioxide travels, you have to be able to separate the sulfur dioxide from one factory, or one power plant, and trace it as it moves through the atmosphere. That's like listening to five symphonies playing at once and trying to pick out the work of a single flautist.

Until now.

This is why a study of radioactive sulfur from Fukushima matters. That disaster produced so much radioactive sulfur that it was obvious when the plume from Fukushima reached the shores of California. This signal was loud enough to stand out from the noise. The radioactive sulfur from Fukushima isn't exactly the same thing as the sulfur dioxide from Chinese power plants, but it is close enough that it can serve as a marker. It's a model that can tell scientists some important things about how sulfur travels through the atmosphere and how it crosses great distances, like the Pacific Ocean.

"There are lots of sources of sulfur pollution and a lot of uncertainty in the models," Antra Priyadarshi said. "But this is a case when we can know better how much radioactive sulfur was produced at the source, and how much arrived, and you can neglect the natural background signal. That gives you a better estimation of how much sulfur could be transported over the Pacific."

Photo by Dawn Erb. Used with permission.

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